These are the thoughts and observations of me — a woman of a certain age. (Oh, my, God, I'm 60!) I'm single. I'm successful enough (independent, self supporting). I live in the burbs and work in the city (Chicago, the best city in the world). I'm an aunt, a friend and a colleague. I feel that voices like mine are rather underrepresented online or in print. So here I am. If my musings resonate with you, please visit my blog again sometime.

Monday, December 15, 2008

This week's Give Me Five is devoted to "favorite holiday songs." I'm listening to my Christmas playlist right now, so what could be easier?

1. Sleigh Ride by Andy Williams*2. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by Judy Garland3. Merry Christmas, Baby by either The Boss or The King (I love 'em both)4. The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire) by Barbra Streisand5. River by James Taylor

To play along yourself, or to see how other bloggers responded, click here.

*11 months out of the year, I give Andy Williams no thought whatsoever. But between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I demand Andy.

One thing about our guv that we have all always agreed on, we love his hair. Which this post almost from late last week almost made me laugh till my Classic Coke came out my nose.

Important hair characteristic: Fuzziness.

One thing to keep in mind about Blago is that even though he has ascended to the almost God-like height of governor of a decaying Rust Belt state, he is still an ordinary human like you and me. He still puts his pants on one leg at a time, and he still requires a six-figure no-show job for his wife, so he can continue to afford pants made out of solid gold for him to put on one leg at a time. Thus, his hair is not some perfect Platonic ideal that can be described by a clean and elegant mathematical formula as a curved and unbroken surface wrapped around his head; rather, there are numerous tiny hairs frizzing out from the top of his ‘do, each one a reminder of his essential, flawed humanity (that and the corruption).

Important hair characteristic: Imperviousness.

You must always remember that Blago is a working-class man of the people. You fancy types, all you need is a hairdo that can survive cocktail parties and meetings where you stack up huge piles of gold coins and count them while giggling foppishly. But our Blago needs to take his hair out and engage in the sort of activities that ordinary Chicagoans enjoy — like, for instance, going down to the old watering hole and frolicking in an enormous pool of feces. Throughout it all, his hair must remain unmussed — and that’s the sort of endurance that it displays in this cartoon.

Important hair characteristic: Gelatinous unity.

As already noted, Blago’s hair is massive enough to generate a gravitational field detectable at a macrospatial level. But what are the larger cosmological implications of this? After his hair has assumed a spherical shape, the individual fibers will begin to break down, the hair molecules intermingling into a single semi-solid body kept in place only by its mutual attraction, resulting a huge, planetoid wobbling (see the motion lines!) at the crown of good governor’s skull! In the next logical step, the hair will begin attracting extraneous matter into its gravity well, eventually creating a Hair Black Hole that will destroy us all. We must isolate him in a gravity-free containment cell before it is too late!

OK, this one isn’t about Blago’s hair at all (and deserves some kind of Medal of Restraint for that decision). And sure, it’s all fun and games to depict the sinister governor in handcuffs, but we need to ask: Did so much attention really need to be spent on the way his pants bunch up around his ass? With that, I wish you a happy weekend of thinking about Blago’s buttocks!